Hosting Recommendations for Membership Sites

Hosting Recommendations for Membership Sites

There are a growing number of excellent website hosts for membership sites. At the same time, there are
many popular names which don’t provide website owners with everything they need to host their
membership site. The key to selecting the right host for your membership site is understanding the key
features necessary to provide fast, efficient, cost effective solutions.

Is SSD Important?

The hosting environment is in a state of transition. Many of the first movers are moving to solid-state drives
whereas some of the most popular brands remain operating in a hard disk drive environment. This raises the
initial question of whether and SSD host is preferable to a standard host. The truth is choosing a host which
offers and SSD environment provides numerous benefits over your basic hard drive host.

What Is the Difference?

Before we get into determining which option is best, it is important to understand the differences. Traditional
hard drives store data on data platters, otherwise known as drives, best been very quickly. The data is written
to and read from the drives by a data arm. Solid-state drives have no moving parts. They are 100% electronic
and are typically much faster at reading and writing data than traditional hard drives. A common measuring
stick is inputs and outputs per second or IOPS. The most popular hard drives currently use anywhere from 7.2
to 15K SAs. This means they spin 7,200 – 15,000 times per minute. The IOPS for a 15k SAS drive is 180-200. A
typical datacenter ready SSD operates at a range of 4,600 to 75,000 IOPS. It is clear a SSD is much faster.

Does Disk Speed Matter When Selection a Membership Site Host?

So, we can agree and SSD hostess faster, but does it matter? This speed is important for the sole reason that
your website will perform faster. This means pages load faster and databases will perform functions faster.
The result is a better experience for your members. As a bonus, Google search algorithm measures a variety
of metrics to determine website ranking including page load time.

Uptime is Critical

along with the type of drive used to power a server, uptime of a website host is essential. Nothing will drive
away members faster than trying to access the site and consistently being told it is down. Don’t be fooled by
99% uptime claims. The best hosts offer a minimum of 99.9% and the best even boast 99.99% – although
independent tests show it may be closer to 99.90% for most hosts. Regardless, it is important to select the
host which guarantees and uptime and can either stick to it or reimburse you for the downtime.

Is There a Best Host?

There are numerous website hosts which are great at handling membership websites. One example is Fast Comet
Hosting. They offer shared hosting plans starting at less than four dollars a month and VPS hosting starting at
five dollars a month. They even offer WordPress hosting which is preconfigured to ensure maximum speed
and security. WordPress specific plans start at four dollars a month and max out at less than $10 a month.
The turbo plan, at less than $10 a month, are optimized and pre-tuned for performance for websites using
the WordPress platform. This includes turbo cache, memcache, and apc/opcache. While they are not the only
host round that offers excellent WordPress hosting, they do create an excellent baseline of what you should
expect from a quality host.

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1 Comment

Hosting selection is the first and the most critical steps to create your WordPress membership site. You should leave old school HDD hosting companies out of options, such as hostgator. I personally use SSD WordPress hosting for my membership site. It’s much faster than the traditional web hosting.